The two brothers stare at each other quietly, until Ada nudges Ben to carry the cooler, then rolls her eyes at me.
The tension dissolves gradually throughout the afternoon. Partially because we all skirt around topics that could elicit another clash, and mostly because of the beer Ada slides out of the cooler once we reach the beach. We rent chairs for the afternoon with a perfect view of the bay and the ocean, and I take Lewis’s hand as we wade into the glistening waves. When Ada joins us, I decide to give the siblings some time on their own, cutting deeper into the water instead.
Back at our spot, Ben finishes a call and heads toward the shore as we open our beers. “I miss being so close to the sea,” I say, shielding my eyes from the sun to watch his shape recede.
Lewis shrugs. “Berlin has nice lakes.”
Ada plops down onto the lounger next to mine as Lewis takes a seat in the sand between us. “God, I can’t imagine long distance.”
“It’s not ideal, but we try to see each other about once a month, although really, it’s more like every four to six weeks,” I tell her, recalling the schedule Lewis and I came up with on that incriminating page in his notebook. Something about the lie tastes bitter in my mouth now. It was easier to pretend in front of his family when I didn’t wish so hard for it to be real.
“But we talk on the phone every day,” Lewis interjects.
“He calls me in the mornings to get me out of bed.”
“And she calls me at night, and we cook dinner together.”
“He runs me through his slides before he has to give presentations or lectures.” We didn’t spell out all of these details before, but with my recurring daydreams, it’s easy to imagine what our relationship could look like if we really did try to make it work.
Lewis’s lips quirk into a smile. “Sometimes she calls me during work to get feedback on her study designs.”
Ada laughs at our back-and-forth. “Okay, you don’t make it sound so bad. How far apart do you live again?”
“Seven hours by train,” I reply at the same time as Lewis says, “Four hours of combined flight and train.”
It’s normal that I know this because I have to make the journey every time I want to see my family. But Lewis? He has no reason to know anything about Maastricht, the small Dutch university town I presently call home. He wouldn’t know how long it takes and how to get there.
Unless he looked it up.
Our gazes catch and I want to lean into the discovery that, just like me, he has also thought about life after the Sawyer’s. It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one, but a wave of sadness rolls in simultaneously. We both live in Central Europefor now, but who knows where I’ll relocate to at the end of the year?
Though maybe the distance between us doesn’t have to be such a bad thing. Maybe it’s the one way I could stay true to myself, if we did want to try.
“You know, Teddy’s never introduced anybody to our family.” Ada peers at me over the rim of her sunglasses, her brown eyes half-moons over the tortoiseshell frames.
“Not true. I brought girls over,” he protests, pulling a knee up to his chest.
“Yeah, but you never introduced them to me. They’d slink around the place and dreamily look at your blond locks when you were getting ready to leave for some party. I happened to be there. That’s different.” She ruffles her brother’s hair. In return, he catches her arm and wrestles it down. Ada shrieks, then lifts her hands in surrender.
“This used to be so much easier,” she mutters, but the grin on her face tells me she doesn’t mind one single bit that Lewis has the upper hand now.
Lewis sits up and wipes the sand off his kneecaps. “Well, any other embarrassing childhood stories you want to share?”
Ada tilts her head to the side and pouts. “I have a few things in mind…”
“I better leave you alone for this.” Sighing mockingly, Lewis gets up and kisses my forehead.
Unsure if he still needs me as a buffer, I catch Lewis’s wrist before he pulls away. “Hey,” I murmur. “If you need me, just give me a wave and I’ll come over, okay?”
He nods just before he runs down to the shore to meet Ben. I watch the water splash around his legs, and from the corner of my eye I can see that Ada’s looking at them as well.
“So?” I turn to her, eager to hear about Lewis’s childhood shenanigans.
Eyes fixed on her younger brothers, Ada’s smile fades. “What’s it like, his life there?” she asks instead, so quietly I barely hear her over the rush of the waves.
I grip the neck of my bottle and snip my thumbnail against its lip, rooting through my brain for a reply. I can’t tell her the truth, that I’ve never seen his life in Berlin. But from what he’s told me and what I know about the city, I can piece together some things. I tell her that he loves the way the city comes alive in summers, when he can have lunch in the park outside the institute, that he’s charmed all but one of the nurses on the epileptic monitoring unit where he spends a lot of weekends to collect data. That after three years, he’s not offended anymore when a native treats him with the cheeky rudeness that’s so typical for the city.
“But is he happy there?”
